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Didn't see thermals mentioned. Seagate goes for record-setting internal temps by totally sealing their drives in plastic. I have several GoFlex multi-TB units that, out of the box, exceed their max rated limits! It seems impossible that a company that can build a modern hard drive can't produce a ventilated plastic box to house it. At least I thought it was impossible, but technology advances....

Yeah I know these are different animals but they still say "Seagate" on them, and those incompetent packaging engineers must have moved on to some other project. Could be this one.

The fan pulls air through the chassis from front to back. The air enters through the spaces around the drive sleds and is pulled through/over the drives before being pushed out the perforated rear panel.

I've been looking to get a NAS device to replace the W7 box/HW RAID card setup I have running at home as a NAS. I built that box 3 years ago to replace the SOHO NAS JUNK that was for sale at that time. I.E. under $600 or so.

This box looks promising...but still, the storage format is not compatible with Windows. If the NAS itself fails, I have to wait until a replacement NAS is purchased to see if my data is there, and that worries me.Reply

It depends on the NAS drive file system actually. There are ext4 drivers for Windows that enable read/write of ext4 volumes. I have read that people are able to pull a drive from a RAID1 and read it on a Windows machine...perhaps it depends on the NAS vendor as well though.Reply

This unit's lineage is not related to the GoFlex, rather, it is from LaCie (the use of Noctua fans, for example).

I am very happy with the thermal performance. All our evaluation was done with the WD Re drives (known for not being very 'cool'), and never once did the temperatures go above 50 C in our stress tests.Reply

seriously, how can you keep flogging the crap ARMADA 370 SoC in a NAS as a good investment, tindustrial hey are far lower spec than even a A8 in data throughput and the ports are second rate add-on's for a soc that cant cope.....

Dude, just accept that different people have different desires and needs.

Personally I don't see the point of these NAS boxes --- I can (and do) create much the same thing by hooking up a bunch of external drives to an old Mac and using OSX's soft RAID. Meets my needs, may not meet yours, especially if your needs demand RAID5 or live disk replacement.

Likewise some other people's NEEDs (not desires, NEEDs) are "absolutely trivial installation", or "comes in a single box that can easily be moved, with no bits hanging out".

You're like the salesman who, asked "please show me the laptops department" starts ranting about "you don't want a laptop, you want a tablet. Here, let me show you our fine selection of tablets."Reply

Ganesh, I can attest to the fact that LaCie's fan design on their 5Big boxes for example - isn't really good for thermals. Like I commented earlier, I had a LaCie 5Big NAS Pro consistently overheat here in California where the ambient room temps can easily rise to 80F. I replaced the 120mm Noctua with a 150mm Thermaltake and also cut out the fan grill. It worked but the LaCie RAID config was already broken and no amount of recovery would help.Reply

That is disappointing to hear. I have the 5big Pro running without issues, but I have it perched on a shelf open on all four sides (basically a garage rack converted to hold stuff) where there is plenty of air-flow. One issue with the 5big box is that you have to make sure the underside is pretty clear (air intake is through that).

That said, I do have more confidence in the NAS 4-bay, as the air is being pulled in through the front side of the unit. But, then, again, the NAS 4-bay doesn't have a metal body, so some heat loss through conduction will be missed.Reply

With these huge RAID-Rebuild times greatly increasing the risk of a second drive failure, wouldn't it make sense to add a dedicated chip that speeds this up? This would even help during normal operation?Reply